Author Archive

In celebration of Peer Review Week, with the theme of Recognition for Review – we would like to highlight the top 10 reviewers for Environmental Science: Processes& Impacts in 2016, as selected by the editor for their significant contribution to the journal.

Name

Institution

Dr Douglas Latch

Seattle University

Dr Hans Peter Arp

Norwegian Geotechnical Institute

Dr Christina Remucal

University of Wisconsin

Dr Dong-Mei Zhou

Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dr Zhanyun Wang

ETH Zürich

Dr Stefan Trapp

Technical University of Denmark

Dr Thilo Rennert

University of Hohenheim

Dr Birgit Braune

Carleton University

Dr Barbara Ervens

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

Dr Crispin Halsall

Lancaster University

We would like to say a massive thank you to these reviewers as well as the Environmental Science: Processes&Impacts board and all of the environmental chemistry community for their continued support of the journal, as authors, reviewers and readers.

Review to win!As a little added bonus to celebrate Peer Review Week, for the next four weeks our reviewers will be in with a chance of winning a fantastic prize! Simply submit a review for any of our journals between 19September and 16 October 2016 and you will be automatically eligible for a chance to win one of our fantastic prizes.

An algal bloom is a rapid increase or accumulation in the population of algae in a water system. It can break the balance of an aquatic ecosystem and hence threaten the quality of drinking water. Therefore it’s really important that we are able to develop reliable models to predict algae growth and the effects this would have on access to safe drinking water. Having that in mind, Nie and co-workers suggest new prediction and control models for algal blooms in the urban section of the Jialing River, one of the tributaries of the reservoir and home of more than 8 million people.

Fig. 1 – Comparison between CAA and related parameters.

Enzyme activity has been shown to be useful as early indicator in algal blooms. Algae growth is usually accompanied by a high nutrient concentration, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus being the most abundant elements. Whereas there are a number of studies relating N and P to algal blooms, studies with C are far outnumbered. The enzyme responsible for taking inorganic carbon sources into the algae cells is the carbonic anhydrase (CA). It catalyses the transformation of aqueous HCO3– into CO2, which is then transferred into the cells by diffusion to be transformed back into HCO3– that will later be used in the process of carbon fixation. Measuring the carbonic anhydrase activity (CAA) is cheaper, faster and more accurate than other techniques used to predict algal blooms. However, as such a complex process, it is necessary to link CAA to other micro parameters, which then should give a good starting point for predicting and controlling algal blooms.

This study, based on the urban section of the Jialing River, investigated the different form of carbons, water temperature, flow velocity (V), pH, CO2 concentration, CAA and algal cell density and the relations between these factors. The data was collected in four different sites alongside the river from December 2013 to October 2014.

After analysing all these parameters, Nie and colleagues found the following correlations between them, CAA and algal cell density (Fig. 1 and 2).

Nie and colleagues could determine whether an algal bloom would occur based on the conditions of algal cell density. The threshold for algal blooms was set in 0.2 x 106 cells per L. Considering the positive correlation between the density of algae and CAA, the threshold for algal blooms was set in 0.650 EU per 106 cells and 0.864 EU per 106 cells. This means that when algal density is increasing and CAA is higher than 0.650 EU per 106 cells, an algal bloom will occur. On the other side, if CAA is lower than 0.864 EU per 106 cells and algal density is decreasing, the algal bloom will disappear.

Algal blooms are caused by multiple factors thus the combination of multiple parameters is necessary for a reliable and efficient model. To improve the method credibility, the following equation was identified as the monitoring model for the whole year:

cells = 23.278CAA – 42.666POC + 139.547pH – 1057.106

The identification of a control period is paramount to prevent an algal bloom. These researchershave also identified a model based on CAA that is able to predict algal cell density during the key control period, February to March:

During the award ceremony Hiromitsu Urakami from the Royal Society of Chemistry presented several certificates to poster prize winners on behalf of our environmental science journals.

Congratulations to all of the winners!

Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts Winners:

Tomohiko Nakano, Kyoto University

Poster title: Development of a molecularly imprinted polymer for selective adsorption of estrogenic substances

Hiromitsu Urakami (left), Tomohiko Nakano (right)

Congratulations to Ayaka Onishi, University of Tokyo who also won an Environmental Science: Processes & Impactsposter prize for the poster entitled;

“A study on anomaly concentration of arsenic to ferruginous precipitate in Tokyo, Japan”

And the winners for the Environmental Science: Nano and Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology poster prizes were Kosuke Ranaka and Suzumi Nishimura. More details can be found on our ES: Nano and ES:Water blogs.

This event organised by the Water Science Forum, the Environmental Chemistry Group and the International Network of Environmental Forensics with support from the Environment, Sustainability and Energy Division will focus on exploring the chemistry of emerging contaminants which have recently been discovered in soil and/or water environments and are considered to be a potential risk to the environment and/or and human health.

Here we present a collection of research papers, review articles, and themed collections published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, designed to answer a variety of questions related to the causes and impacts of climate change. From atmospheric chemistry to geochemical cycling and analytical techniques, this collection contains the latest research at the cutting edge.

“In the lead up to the UN climate change conference in Paris in late 2015, it is timely to consider the importance of chemistry in climate science,” comments Susan Solomon, advisory board member of Environ. Sci.: Processes Impacts, “This collection showcases the essential contributions of chemical science to understanding climate change. As the world weighs mitigation and adaptation options, chemists will be part of the search for solutions.”

“The chemical sciences play a pivotal role in a sustainable and prosperous future” says Dominic Tildesley, President of the Royal Society of Chemistry “whether it’s developing new antibiotics to combat infection, converting waste to energy, or developing efficient solar energy cells, chemists are designing and applying tomorrow’s technologies.”

You can read all of these articles for free until 20 December 2014! We truly hope you enjoy this collection.

Ed’s research investigates the transport, fate, reactions and ecological implications of human-derived pollutants in natural and engineered aquatic systems. He also investigates how engineered treatment systems work and optimizes their performance for contaminant removal, with a special interest in non-point source pollution and engineered natural systems.

MY RESEARCH VISION:

It is evident that human activities have significant impacts on water quality, but I think we don’t actually know the answers to “how, what, when” type questions yet to understand what these impacts really are. These are key questions to answer: Which chemicals matter? Which don’t? What should we do about them? We are discharging tens and even hundreds of thousands of chemicals into water, air, and soil, yet we have an surprisingly incomplete understanding of whether this is a bad idea or not, whether any adverse impacts occur on our ecosystems or us from these pervasive exposures. We still struggle to prioritize our efforts on understanding chemical fate and impacts, and for those with adverse impacts, what the best mitigation and treatment strategies are. So, I’d say my research vision is to try and figure out which of these chemical impacts on water quality are important and which are not. Once we understand that question, we can move on to technical and policy solutions for problematic compounds.

Having grown up in the outdoors, especially fishing with my family, I am pretty sure that I really like water and spending time around it! So I am inspired and motivated by the thought that I can be part of this larger effort in making sure humans and ecosystems have enough of the high quality water we all need. It’s so clear that we are not on a sustainable path, and we need to figure out some good solutions to the worst problems, including preventing future problems, in a world of limited resources.

Four years after Hungary’s disastrous red mud spill, Will Mayes and co-workers at the University of Hull, UK, have shown that implemented remediation measures have successfully limited the long term impacts of the spill on the affected Danube tributaries. Elemental and particle size analyses of fluvial sediments sampled downstream from the spill site in 2013 showed that the characteristic geochemical signature of the red mud was predominantly absent compared to in post-disaster surveys, highlighting that the contaminated material was mostly removed by intervention measures.

Geology, and especially the field of geochemistry, has become inextricably linked to the environmental sciences, and has evolved over the past few decades to view earth in a much more holistic fashion. The papers in this themed collection reflect the diversity of research problems that face earth scientists studying environmentally relevant processes today. They range from the nano- to macro-scale and tackle problems that face organic and inorganic geochemists alike.